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Tuesday’s horror naturally brought to mind the similar event ten years ago in Newtown, CT when 20-year-old Adam Lanza went on a shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He killed twenty of the school’s children and six teachers, then shot himself. Before setting out on his rampage he’d shot and killed his mother, with whom he lived. Lanza’s parents had separated when he was nine; he hadn’t seen his father for two years.
The killer in Texas this week was 18-year-old Salvador Ramos. The town was Uvalde, TX; the school, Robb Elementary. Ramos killed nineteen children and two adults before being shot dead by a Border Patrol agent. Before setting out on his rampage Ramos had shot his grandmother, although not fatally. He lived with the grandmother because his mother had thrown him out.
Aside from noting these obvious parallels I can’t think of much to say that I didn’t say ten years ago about the Sandy Hook massacre—listen here.
I’m skeptical of talk about causes and solutions. I don’t believe this is a zone of cause and effect, of problem and solution: I think this is a zone of chaos; a zone where stuff happens, without any rhyme or reason we can comprehend at the present state of our knowledge.
For sure, the event itself is not an issue on which any sane person can take sides. There is no argument to be made for the mass murder of little children. Even in the worst extremes of total war, where things can get pretty indiscriminate, the deliberate targeting of children is beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior, by common agreement among civilized peoples.
The main thing I’d change: my 2012 description of the NRA as “one of the best-organized and most effective lobbies in our political life.”
I’m still an NRA member and I still donate when I can, but they have foolishly gotten themselves into legal tangles [The lawsuit seeking to impose the “death penalty” on the NRA, explained, by Ian Millhiser, Vox, May 13, 2021] that I believe with good sense, good accounting, and foresight they could have avoided. I doubt those tangles will end with the NRA being dissolved, but it will be less able to stand as first line of defense for our Second Amendment rights.
That’s a big blow to our rights just by itself. The power-hungry government gun-grabbers will worm their way into any cracks in our defenses, and right now the NRA is showing a lot of cracks.
The Uvalde killings actually illustrated some of our favorite Second Amendment talking-points. For example, we have all enjoyed the quip: “Call for the cops, call for a pizza delivery, see which one gets to you first.”
In the case of Uvalde, the answer is plain. Salvador Ramos fired off his first shots in the street outside Robb Elementary School at 11:28 a.m. The first 911 call came in about two minutes later, at 11:30. Cops first showed up at 11:44—so that’s a fourteen-minute delay [ Cops now say Salvador Ramos entered school ‘unobstructed,’ wasn’t shot dead for nearly an hour , by MaryAnn Martinez, Craig McCarthy and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon , NY POST, May 28, 2022]
My bet’s on the pizza delivery.
And what did the cops do when they got there? Why, they made lots of phone calls: for body armor, snipers, trained negotiators.
Around 11:54—so this is ten minutes after the cops showed up—parents began arriving and begged the cops to storm the school building. The cops, annoyed at having their phone calls interrupted, acted on the time-honored principle of policing everywhere: that law-abiding citizens are much easier to beat down than are criminals and lunatics.
At least one mother, Angeli Rose Gomez, who had children in third and fourth grade at the school, was handcuffed. She told The Wall Street Journal she saw other parents tackled, tasered, and pepper-sprayed while Salvador Ramos went gleefully about his work inside the school [Uvalde Shooter Fired Outside School for 12 Minutes Before Entering, by Douglas Belkin, Rob Copeland, and Elizabeth Findell, May 26, 2022].
It’s hard to see how private citizens, whose primary concern is the safety of their loved ones, could do any worse of a job.
That’s the beating heart of citizens’ rights, including Second Amendment rights, right there.
As a footnote to that, I’m wondering whether perhaps Latino government is even suckier than the Anglo-Saxon variety. Uvalde, although of course in the U.S.A., is a very Latino town. Look at the names of the dead: Ramirez, Garcia, Rodriguez, Torres[The victims of the Texas school shooting in Uvalde, Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2022].
But is there an immigration angle? A friend who lived and worked in that area forty years ago doubts it:
These Hispanic Texans have been in the US longer than even most of my ancestors. Maybe there are some [illegal] immigrants since I was there, but back then at least in Carrizo, Crystal City, and even more so in Uvalde, there were not a lot of recent immigrants. They either stayed in the border towns, or headed north to the cities. The Uvalde region was too poor, and the Hispanic Texans didn’t like immigrants very much. They may have not liked Anglos much either, but they identified as Americans, they didn’t wave the Mexican flag around.
One final note here. Talking heads on TV are shrieking for Congress to do something or other about guns. Hoo-kay: What did Congress do after Sandy Hook? Obviously, nothing that fixed the problem of crazy kids shooting up schools.
But that’s what Congress mostly does—nothing. Well, not altogether nothing. There’s the Freedom to Fish Act, forty billion dollars for Ukraine, the world’s second most corrupt white nation (the first of course being Russia), and similar legislation that either nobody of any importance cares about or that nobody of any importance disagrees about.
So I’m not worried that Congress will take away our gun rights. Some Kritarch may take them away; Joe Biden may take them away; but Congress? Fugeddaboutit.
On mental health issues, which was the second point I raised in 2012, I am even more sure than I was then that our understanding of mental health is about where our understanding of physical health was in the Middle Ages.
Partly that’s because I’ve now read Andrew Scull’s 2016 book Madness in Civilization; subtitle “A Cultural History of Insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine.”
Scull gives a withering account of all the fads, theories, cults, and potions that have been used as a basis for treating mad people down through the ages, including this present age. You put the book down convinced of what you previously just suspected: that psychiatry is a pseudoscience, a racket kept afloat by Big Pharma and the health-insurance companies.
If you’re not much interested in how mad people were dealt with in Ancient Greece or 18th-century England, just read the last chapter in Scull’s book, dealing with the modern age. Sample:
A succession of studies during the late 1960s and 1970s had demonstrated the extraordinary unreliability of psychiatric diagnoses. Even with respect to what were regarded as the most serious forms of psychiatric disturbance, different psychiatrists only agreed upon the diagnosis about 50 percent of the time. Many of these studies had been conducted by the profession itself, including a landmark study by the British psychiatrist John Cooper and his associates of differential diagnosis in a cross-national context. That research showed that what British psychiatrists diagnosed as manic depression, their American counterparts were prone to label schizophrenia, and vice versa.
That landmark study was in 1972. In an endnote Scull tells us that in one of the findings. British and American psychiatrists were both shown videotapes of two British patients and invited to diagnose what was wrong with them: 85 and 69 percent of American psychiatrists diagnosed schizophrenia; 7 and 2 percent of their British colleagues did so.
Scull’s book is full of gems like that. Don’t even get him started on the DSM—that’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association—which is supposed to be an encyclopedia of mental disorders, but which keeps changing its mind about what is a mental disorder and what isn’t.
Thus the first edition of the DSM in 1952 listed homosexuality as a disorder; in 1973, after some lobbying, that was removed.
Contrariwise, heavy smoking was not listed until the fifth edition of the DSM in 2013, where it showed up as “Tobacco Use Disorder.”
Professor Andrew Scull has a new book out this month: Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness. It was reviewed in Literary Review by an academic psychiatrist, Joanna Moncrieff. Her description of the DSM:
A political document the function of which is to facilitate insurance claims, rather than having anything to do with science or medicine. The sense of certainty created by a diagnosis, though welcomed by many patients and clinicians, is ultimately illusory. Madness & Mistreatment, May 6, 2022
I’ve had some personal acquaintance with the psychiatric profession…but I’ll put that in my Monthly Diary. Suffice it to say that I am a deep skeptic, and take reassurance from knowing that credentialed scholars like Andrew Scull and psychiatrists like Joanna Moncrieff are likewise.
I’d like to see crazy people locked up in asylums, for their own benefit and our safety.
However, between the obviously crazy and the obviously normal, there is a wide and thorny terrain of oddity and eccentricity. The great majority of odd or eccentric people will live out their lives harmlessly muttering to themselves; some tiny proportion will do homicidally crazy things.
Can we figure out in advance whether some given individual belongs to that tiny portion or not? No, we can’t. Can we lock up all the odd and eccentric? Possibly we could, if we were willing to spend half our Gross National Product building asylums and training staff. Should we? No, not if we have any regard for personal liberty.
Last Sunday morning a middle-aged white guy, a Wall Street professional, was sitting in a subway car going through downtown Manhattan. A young black guy was pacing up and down the car muttering to himself. Then suddenly, for no reason anyone can figure, he pulled out a handgun and shot the white guy dead. The shooter has since been found, arrested, and charged with murder [Suspect in NYC subway shooting Andrew Abdullah charged with murder, NY Post, May 28, 2022].
Alleged subway killer negotiating his surrender through a minister from Brooklyn, who arrived at the 5th Precinct stationhouse in a ROLLS ROYCE to talk to police https://t.co/JxQjevuQEI
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) May 24, 2022
Two days after that, on Tuesday evening, I myself was riding the subway on my way to Penn Station from an event uptown. There were two other people in my car: a young white guy sitting opposite me engrossed in his smartphone, and, further along from us, a large and very disheveled black guy talking quite loud to no-one at all. He wasn’t paying any attention to us, just talking to the empty seats opposite him, occasionally raising his voice to a shout.
The shooter had been arrested earlier that day, so I knew this wasn’t him. I can’t say I was nervous: well-nigh all lunatics are harmless. I didn’t move, though in case he saw me moving and got up to come and yell in my face, which I thought I’d prefer to avoid. Nothing happened; I got out at Penn Station.
Thought experiment: Imagine that a month ago, say, you could have brought both of those guys—last Sunday’s subway shooter and my Tuesday subway shouter—in front of a panel of credentialed, experienced psychiatrists. Would the shrinks have been able to tell you which of the two guys would shortly commit a murder?
No, they wouldn’t. Mental health isn’t anything like physical health. There aren’t distinctive diseases, with known causes, unambiguous symptoms, and predictable developments. We understand less about the mind than Geoffrey Chaucer understood about the body.
Sure, we have a handful of drugs like Lithium that help with manic depression; although, as Dr Moncrieff says, Lithium is also toxic, and the long-term benefits are questionable. Most psychiatric medicines are either placebos or mild narcotics. None of them cures anything.
All we can do is what our ancestors did: lock up in asylums people who are obviously mad—humanely, for our general safety, and always with the hope their madness may pass spontaneously, which sometimes happens.
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” Macbeth asked his family physician. The doctor, an honest man, answered in the negative.
The answer today would be the same.
And then, my third point in 2012, the culture. Back then, I pooh-poohed most of the commentary about Sandy Hook that blamed it on the culture: on violent movies and video games, absent fathers, or the decline of religious belief. No, no, and no, I argued.
That’s what I still say. But now I wouldn’t rule out cultural developments altogether.
Smartphones, for example, were still somewhat of a novelty in 2012. Today they are ubiquitous.
All right, I admit: I hate the damn things. You’re walking along the street, or sitting in a subway car, and everybody—well, except for the crazy guy further along in the car yelling at invisible enemies—everybody is staring at their damn fool smartphones. How can the word “zombies” not come to mind?
Or you go to the doctor or the dentist. He keeps you waiting for half an hour and there is nothing to read. These places used to have a stack of magazines you could browse in. Now…nothing, except perhaps some six-page drug company brochure masquerading as a health magazine.
I suppose I shall have to get one of the filthy things eventually; everyday life is increasingly organized around them. Still, I regard my eventual acquisition of a smartphone the same way I regard death: inevitable sooner or later, but to be postponed for as long as possible.
I’ll allow, though, if you attach electrodes to my gonads, that smart phones are a convenience for normal people.
What are they to abnormal people, though? Here are a couple of data points.
- From Fox News on Sunday’s subway shooting in New York City: “NYPD Chief of Detectives James Essig said during a Tuesday press conference that the only words witnesses heard Abdullah utter before the attack were: ‘No phones.’ [NYC subway shooting suspect charged with murder in ‘unprovoked’ death, uttered ‘no phones’ before attack: cops, by Stephanie Pagones, and Marta Dhanis, Fox News, May 24, 2022]
- Salvador Ramos, the Uvalde school shooter, lived with his grandparents. On Thursday, May 26, this week journalist Ali Bradley interviewed the grandpa. He told her that Salvador was always on his phone, and that just hours before the shooting, Salvador’s grandma said she was going to take him off their mobile payment plan.
Shooter in #Uvalde tragedy lived w/his grandparents periodically for the past few months, per his Grandpa, Roland Reyes. He says just hours before the shooting, the gunman’s grandma said she was going to take him off their mobile plan—Reyes says the 18y/o was always on his phone. pic.twitter.com/nhdqD9GLWM
— Ali Bradley (@AliBradleyTV) May 27, 2022
I’m just sayin’. What means handy convenience to a normal person might mean something entirely different to a lunatic.
And then, much more in evidence now than it was ten years ago, there is the sex revolution.
Note my careful wording there: “the sex revolution,” not “the sexual revolution.”
The sexual revolution was that era fifty or sixty years ago when traditional social constraints relating to sex were lowered or eliminated. Disapproval of illegitimacy and homosexuality—or, as I once expressed it, “bastardy and buggery”—disapproval also of open sex talk and pornography, all that disapproval was mocked or legislated away, leaving us all free to find sexual happiness wherever we chose, to the general improvement of mental health and the advance of personal liberty, or so we were promised.
That was the sexual revolution. Its results were mixed. Yes, there was some increase of liberty. Harmless people who had lived lives of shame, fear, and concealment were free to participate openly and honestly in society.
There were also downsides, though: exploitation, the decline of the family at the bottom of society, some crudity and ugliness in language and the arts, and of course AIDS.
But here I’m talking about the sex revolution: the recalibration of traditional male and female roles, always to the disadvantage of men; and more recently the effort to deny biological sex altogether, to elevate the airily subjective over the grittily real.
Some of the effects are well-known. For example: In spring of 2021 59.5 percent of college students in the United States were women. It’s a good bet that the proportion passed 60 percent sometime last year.
And then there’s actual, you know, sex. There’s a steady trickle of news stories about how millennials and Gen-Zers—that’s people born after 1996—aren’t having as much sex as previous cohorts. Here’s one from last October telling me that among Gen-Z-ers aged 20 to 24, fifteen percent are sexually inactive[What’s Driving Gen Z’s Aversion to Sex? | Opinion, by Debra Soh, Newsweek, October 12, 2021]. Having been aged 20 to 24 in the late 1960s, I find that pretty incredible.
Some of the factors here aren’t hard to figure out. It’s a fact well-known to dating services that women are much pickier than men. Not to be too crude about it: men will date anything. A woman, however, is seeking a man who looks like he’s going somewhere. She wants to date up.
Back to those college attendance statistics. How are the female sixty percent going to date up, if “up” is defined as having a college degree, and way more gals than guys have one?
Then there’s the sexual harassment hysteria. We used to find mates at our workplace; nowadays, dating a co-worker—or even just suggesting a date—is asking for a lawsuit.
No wonder the word “incel” is current. A lot of young guys are involuntarily celibate. They console themselves as best they can with video games, violent ones for preference.
Lay the past two years COVID restrictions and lockdowns on top of all that, and yeah, the culture is definitely in play.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
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You can’t send the obviously insane to asylums. Not anymore. (I thought you wanted to be careful with words.) “Campuses.” Stocked with all manner of creature comforts and amusements. Lobster, whatever. Unassailable.
Now to the incel problem. At least fix “the biological imperative” part by legalizing all manner of happy-ending massage parlors, and the like.
Now to the eccentrics. Leave us alone. Parody us in sitcoms and movies, sure; that actually increases live-and-let-live acceptance and companionability.
He say Ukraine the world second most corrupt white nation in the world , and of course the ubiquitous disclaimer by Americans and the collective west that ” Russia is the first”. Bullshit dude ! America is number one and pinning it on Russia will not get you off the hook. And they are handing you your asses in Ukraine just because of that Ukrainian corruption that is majorly financed by you and your corrupt cohorts and fellow criminals the Israeli Zionist. And I suppose that you think that Russia is loosing that fight to get out from under your “rules based” global order? Get a life guy, go back to sleep while the country eats itself.
>> Madeleine Albright has entered the chat…
Poor bipolar Freddie deBoer:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new?s=r
My Response to Daniel Bergner’s New York Times Magazine Article on Psychotic Disorders
Video LinkMay 17, 2022
Daniel Bergner NYT piece archived link
More Freddie deBoer:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stop-denying-that-mass-shooters-can-be-mentally-ill
good grief, you must be paid by the word! ranting around and covering as many bases as you could like the blind squirrel looking for a nut!
you are right about the phone- that was likely the trigger point for tranny sal, however he advertised his intent on social media before the event, as well as he had planned this for years, and the police were aware of his plans. you are right about psychiatry, though you might mention IT IS NOT A SCIENCE! that explains a lot. incels- you might mention, as someone pointed out on another article about this shooter, that males on SSRIs can be impotent. that explains a lot of shooters as well as incels. these guys are on meds that prevent them from normal erectile function.
but here is where you really missed important points:
1. a woman teacher intentionally opened a locked school door, propped it open, went back inside leaving it propped open at 11:30, mere minutes before the shooter arrived at the school. now this amounts to either criminal negligence, or accessory to murder if she knew he was coming. now will she be sued? will she even be investigated? will she be charged and prosecuted? these are the real questions and the real nystery behind this event, besides the obvious question:
2. who ordered the cops ‘not to breach’, but to stand down and wait? someone high up knew what they were doing when they ordered the ‘stand down’. and that is a crime, because these same cops had already had active shooter drills at the uvalde high school! thats correct, they paid all the money to have the drill, and when the real shooting occurs, THEY ABANDON THE ENTIRE ACTIVE SHOOTER PROTOCILS AND PROCEDURES IN ORDER TO STAND DOWN!!!’ that cannot in any way be determined to be ‘normal’ or business as usual! it is abnormal and unusual!
as someone has already pointed out- the photo of the uvalde shooter has been doctored to make him look white.
Or you go to the doctor or the dentist. … These places used to have a stack of magazines you could browse in.
Joke from the 1960s: “I went to the dentist yesterday. Did you know the Titanic had sunk?”
(Or maybe it’s older?)
For all his general sensibility, Derb is brainwashed by the general anti-Russia anti-Putin propaganda.
Ya know, the problem with this piece is that it is written with so much mainstream horseshit as a premise for much of its conclusions.
Unless people start to shed the mainstream narratives completely off, most if not all of any conclusions will be false.
If the premises are flawed, so are the conclusions.
There is so much wrong with this shooting that if it’s not a false flag at its finest, yet most obvious, then it involves so much terminally and abject ineptitude, incompetence, etc., that any and all government elements should be instantly dissolved.
Now, as usual, we find out that the FBI was involved. Doesn’t matter tho, the public got it’s marching orders in the first 15 minutes of the Lobotomy Box’s instructions, so they’re off and running, probably out buying masks for the equally suspect “chimp-pox” bio-weapon that’s been foisted upon the world and despite whatever it really is.
SMH at all of this!
The Sandy Hook “narrative” has now become a part of history.
That means the plutocrats have silenced the dissenters.
It was as fake as a three dollar bill–but that is just gonna have to be our little secret.
As to the current “two minutes of hate” I have no clue–yet.
Unless reversed by an appeals court, dissolution is off the table after it was pointed out it was not a suitable remedy for the injured parties, members like you. So it’s been dropped in the recent amended complaint by the NY AG.
That said, “good sense” and “good accounting” let along foresight are simply not on the table. The NRA has been systematically looted by Wayne LaPierre and his Winning Team, with the aid first of a PR vendor, and then an … estranged I don’t think it the right word for a corrupt anti-gun lawyer who’s a son-in-law of the late head of that PR firm. This has gone all the way to firearms lent to the HQ museum going missing as it appears its contents are being partly liquidated to pay the relevant corrupt parties.
The only things wrong in action vs. rhetoric from the NY AG was the filing for dissolution, and that she’s not arrested as many as over a hundred people for their crimes. The high end of the number is from how many of its 76 (!) board members might be criminally liable for not reigning in LaPierre and company. Like in the previous century when they ordered an end to the relationship with the PR firm, it was just continued with a shell company set up. Then again LaPierre and his Winning Team used physical violence at one or more board meeting to stay in power so….
TL;DR: Expect very little useful from the NRA for the foreseeable future, and that includes the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) lobbying part of it, its head, and heir apparent for the whole org Chris Cox was purged back when Oliver North tried to right the ship.
Ask for more details if you want, I’ve been following the org since before the 1977 Cincinnati Revolution, the above mentioned violence was for the purpose of changing the bylaws to make sure that could never happen again.
The answer is right in front of us. Each of these shooters was on psychotropic drugs, so we must give young boys double or triple the dose. Give them as many drugs as it takes until the school shootings stop.
Video Linkhttps://en-volve.com/2022/05/27/andy-ngo-exposed-evil-leftist-who-pretended-to-be-uncle-of-child-murdered-in-uvalde-to-smear-gov-abbott-top-democrats-fell-for-his-lie/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10861919/Man-ordered-cops-NOT-tackle-Texas-gunman-former-911-dispatcher-elected-council.html
Nothing to see here. Move along.
The Derb sanctimonious stuff gets stale. It was Genet who pointed out that the only sympathy for the victims was they allowed themselves to be murdered and mutilated for our vicarious enjoyment. This is the age of homogenized second hand sadomasochism. Mass murder of kiddies is as american as apple pie and 7 day old corndogs.
Adam Lanza was diagnosed as autistic, but he was pretty obviously suffering from schizophrenia (which is a diagnosis that parents paying the shrink can more easily live with and so not change doctors). He was self harming and the injuries were where even could see them, also true of Ramos. No teenager should be given unfettered access to firearms, certainly not an AR-15. There should be a physical and completed educational requirement. plus safety test similar to a driving one, which the person must pay for themselves.
The family let him keep the AR-15, but took away the phone? Seems they got that the wrong way about. The houses cars and pensions of those whose dependents commit such shootings should be forfeit (ditto slacker cops). That will concentrate minds.
If you haven’t read Freud, the Making of an Illusion by Fred Crews
https://www.amazon.com/Freud-Frederick-Crews-audiobook/dp/B074Q2LKH8/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2ZUI3FNTCPLXW&keywords=freud+the+making&qid=1653850278&s=books&sprefix=freud+the+making%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C116&sr=1-2
you would enjoy it.
A reader once told me that I need my own entry in the DSM 5, of which I have been endlessly proud.
“the world’s second most corrupt white nation (the first of course being Russia)”
I find it amusing how we are told that one can guage the level of corruption in a nation like one can guage the level of gas in one’s car. The Ukraine is said to be the second most corrupt nation while Russia is the first, yet, regardless of all it’s “corruption” Russia seems to be running like a well-oiled machine in this war while the Nato, The Ukraine and the US seem to be running like a car on two cylinders. Never forget, that the US defense industry is the land of ten thousand dollar toilet seats and
1.5 trillion dollar F-35 fighter jets that don’t work. I guess how one defines corruption is left to one’s own mind.
Thanks for that excellent piece.
Re: “No phones” – see the ever prescient Ray Bradbury:
http://www.sediment.uni-goettingen.de/staff/dunkl/zips/The-Murderer.pdf
Even the FBI admits sandy hook was a hoax. Their webpage says there were no murders in newtown CT in 2012.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/8tabledatadecpdf/table-8-state-cuts/table_8_offenses_known_to_law_enforcement_by_connecticut_by_city_2012.xls
Glad to see someone else does not have a cell phone. How many people have been killed in car crashes because of those things.? DWT should get you a 3 year license suspension.
Boys and men are being marginalized in every sector of society, punished for their maleness at every level, while women are being relentlessly lauded and rewarded for having vaginas. Thus, of course, men are hurting, men are failing and falling behind women every step of the way. Conclusion: POOR WOMEN! How are they going to date up?
Derby useless as usual.
Sandy Hook was probably fake. Adam Lanza does not even exist, it seems.
This one, I don’t know, it’s also a weird-looking shooter, but already there are many weird things in the narrative, including this thing of him shooting his granny first and then the school. Then the cops not allowing people in, etc etc. It all points out to something a bit different than the officia narrative.
……… and I still donate when I can…..
You’re a chump.
To be fair, a nineteenth century guy might have complained that on the new-fangled train, everyone had their head in a book. I like looking out of the train window, but the subway view is pretty poor – just a tunnel wall.
Remembering my Tube days pre-mobile, most people had a newspaper or paperback. London freesheets did well because they had a captive audience. You can’t look out of the window, and looking at your fellow passengers can get you into trouble.
That might be the real problem. All of the British-type males are instinctively opposed to the Russian character, personality, beliefs, you-name-it. The British are more insane on the Ukraine War even than are the Biden mannequins. They must see the overt masculinity of Russians as a deep threat to their gender softness.
Take that to the next step. The British dominate our WASP culture through its sucky Irish Catholic cohort of outspoken supporters. That filters into the consciousness of young men and women in the USA. The Brits stopped having healthy sex many generations ago. They now fill our education system with psychic poison.
It’s Derbyshire who is the problem.
“1. a woman teacher intentionally opened a locked school door, propped it open, went back inside leaving it propped open at 11:30, mere minutes before the shooter arrived at the school. now this amounts to either criminal negligence, or accessory to murder if she knew he was coming. now will she be sued? will she even be investigated? will she be charged and prosecuted? these are the real questions and the real nystery behind this event, besides the obvious question:
2. who ordered the cops ‘not to breach’, but to stand down and wait? someone high up knew what they were doing when they ordered the ‘stand down’. and that is a crime, because these same cops had already had active shooter drills at the uvalde high school! thats correct, they paid all the money to have the drill, and when the real shooting occurs, THEY ABANDON THE ENTIRE ACTIVE SHOOTER PROTOCILS AND PROCEDURES IN ORDER TO STAND DOWN!!!’ that cannot in any way be determined to be ‘normal’ or business as usual! it is abnormal and unusual!”
Simple answers, really.
1. Smokers. They leave that door propped open so they can run out and have a smoke in between classes. Guaranteed. How do I know? because even as I type there are doors to supposedly secure facilities propped open the world over. It’s just what people do. 99.9999% of the time it’s no problem.
2. Look, I don’t know what you expect. I mean, it’s one thing to shave your head, get a bunch of tats, do a few extra curls at the gym, and call yourself a SWAT team. That part is kinda fun. You get to wear body armor, wraparound sunglasses, and a thigh holster. To breakfast at Denny’s! It’s an entirely different thing to risk getting your head blown off by a crazy guy with a high-powered rifle. Not nearly as much fun. They signed up for the tats and thigh holster part. NOT the crazy guy with high-powered rifle part.
It’s shit slinging like that that screws your credibility. The State of Illinois alone has more corruption than Russia and Ukraine combined. For corruption, the UK beats Russia.
You go way out of your way to denigrate Russia. There is no connection between the Texas shooting and Russia…yet, as you have numerous times, fabricate a narrative to calumniate Russia.
I mark you as a troll for the UK government…a corrupt government that never tires of maligning Russia through deceit and treachery.
Most psychiatric medicines are either placebos or mild narcotics.
They aren’t.
“The British dominate our WASP culture through its sucky Irish Catholic cohort of outspoken supporters. “
Que? Irish Catholics tend not to be so keen on WASP culture, although they loved WASP money and jobs back in the 50s and 60s.
Before I go any further, just let me say that if you see me at the dentist or oil change place, etc. with my nose to my smart phone I am likely to be reading Unz or something similar. Am I still to be considered a zombie? Smart phones are quite liberating really.
“Before I go any further, just let me say that if you see me at the dentist or oil change place, etc. with my nose to my smart phone I am likely to be reading Unz or something similar. Am I still to be considered a zombie? Smart phones are quite liberating really.”
Yes, you’re still a zombie. Put it down. Look around. say “Hi” to the person next to you. Shoot the shit with the counter guy at the oil change place.
Liberating, my ass. Steve Jobs has made you his bitch. You can’t live without him. Liberating. JfC.
That’s touching. Make small talk. That’ll solve everything. Too bad you’re dead wrong Jimbo. That won’t solve anything at all. It might be pleasant but we’ll still be right there in the matrix together.
actually, i worked at an educational instituation for 20 years in texas and no doors were ever propped open without the knowledge of the security guards- for one thing an alarm will go off. in fact, the alarm goes off as soon as a threat is identified. so there goes your simple answer simple simon. and unless you yourself are a SWAT team guy, pour yourself a nice tall glass of STFU, because i am sure you don’t speak for each of them. the orders were to ‘stand down’ and do not breach’, so what each guy might or might not have wanted to do was irrelevant. and you are ignoring the fact that most of the LEOs standing atound had their own kids in the school, and the tactical team that breached , they guy that shot the shooter, he has his kid in the school, so once again, tell me he was somehow too scared to do his job.
just looked it up for you: schools districts get federal funding. if they fail to follow federal guidelines for schools, they lose that funding. they do NOT want to lose that funding. here is the relevant rule:
“Smoking will be banned near schools, state buildings under new laws. Starting Aug. 1, people will no longer be able to smoke within 200 feet of school property. Two new laws will ban smoking in more public places — near K-12 schools and outside the public entrances of state-owned buildings.Jun 10, 2014”
so for 8 years, smoking has been prohibited at all schools that received federal funding. uvalde CISD receives federal funding, so all campuses and school events are ‘no smoking’. so even if a teacher had risked being fired, risked having the school district lose federal funding, that does not in any way, shape, or form answer the questions i posed. so i will reiterate the relevant question: will the teacher who propped the door open and left it open for the school shooter to enter be prosecuted for criminal negligence or as an accesssory to murder?
that was the question- and it is still unanwered.
School shooters seem to come in two flavors. Those who actually shoot children and those who go after peers. I can only recall 4 child shooters in my 70 years on this planet. Lanza, Ramos, an English creep named Hamilton who killed 16 kids and a guy in California named Patrick Purdy who targeted an elementary school with an AK-47 killing 5 and wounding 30. He then killed himself when police arrived. In his case the victims seemed to have been SE Asian refugees.
The others, to the best of my knowledge, have issues with their high school or college classmates or only kill children as collateral damage in their larger murder spree. Interestingly, these high school and up shooters do seem to give hints of their intentions via their social media posts and scribblings. Its doubtful any fellow students or school officials have the time or inclination to follow the social media posts or internet searches of an unpopular teenager and the same is true of local police departments but this maybe something a big data company could manage.
Problem is warning signs would be a helluva lot more common than actually zeroing in on the one guy out of millions who is actually preparing to shoot up a school. Might be worth a look though if we had a less corrupt FBI and DOJ to run the experiment.
This is the most salient part of John’s article.
Most conservatives, and readers of this site in particular, don’t hold issues of “mental health” in high regard, mainly because of the influence of that guy in Vienna about 120 years ago, not to mention all of the junk diagnosis and over-medication associated with mental health practice.
But just because they used to get medical stuff wrong in the old days, like how malaria is spread by mysterious gasses or “bad air” as opposed to mosquitoes, doesn’t mean there was also sound medical reasons for the spread of malaria which had yet to be determined.
Mental health stuff, including the effect the mind can have on the body – particularly the existence of pain – is the “Blue Whale in the room” (bigger than an elephant).
Apples and oranges. There’s a huge difference on the effects on the brain and critical thinking and tech exec’s know this and that’s why many limit their children’s cellphone consumption habits.
this uvalde thing, it is a local problem:
1. the shooter was a local boy who shot local folks- he wasn’t mad at the world, he had a grunge with the locals
2. the shooter was already on the cop radar because he planned mass school shooting 3 years ago and was arrested for that
3. the locals knew he was armed- he advertised it on his social media interactions
4. the high school he had previously planned to shoot up JUST LAST WEEK HAD AN ACTIVE SHOOTER DRILL- yet somehow they were unprepared for the real thing?!?!?!? come on! no one buys that lame punkass excuse- you had the drill!
5. the local cops were the ones that dropped the ball- not the border patrol or the FBI, but the locals FUBAR! so why in the world is this some sort of national problem? it isn’t. it is/was a local problem. and you can bet dollars to donuts that the justice dept will ‘investigate’ and determine that the ‘cops did everything by the book and let’s put the blam where it belongs- the rifle did it’! you feel me?
“I don’t believe this is a zone of cause and effect, of problem and solution: I think this is a zone of chaos; a zone where stuff happens, without any rhyme or reason we can comprehend at the present state of our knowledge.’
And then blames Congress for not fixing the problem.
“What did Congress do after Sandy Hook? Obviously, nothing that fixed the problem of crazy kids shooting up schools.
But that’s what Congress mostly does—nothing.”
Thanks for wasting my time, John.
I’m betting you haven’t either called the police or Dominoes recently either, jackass.
Who was it who said that we really don’t know any more about the human mind than did Plato?
Where are the videos of the actual shooting? All schools have surveillance cams. It’s been a week and so far nothing and even if they release videos now, people will think they were altered. All we get are vids of OUTSIDE the school. It was the same with sandy hook and parkland.
School shooting videos have to be released immediately.
Correct; they are SSRIs, SSRI adjunct boosters, Xanax and ADD meds (although the ADD meds may be on their way out due to lots of controversy).
Thomas Szasz was right. Every psychologist and psychiatrist I’ve personally known over 50 years has had significant mental issues themselves, some acute.
There’s a few more classes of psychiatric drugs, and I’m appalled with two ‘p’s that Mr. Derbyshire is this ignorant of them but willing to dismiss them in his ignorance.
Have never heard of “SSRI adjunct boosters” as such. For antidepressants there’s third generation ones that hit neurotransmitters in addition to serotonin (but read the fine print, many like the first of Prozac have other effects), their might be some that don’t hit it at all. There are more dangerous second generation ones that hit lots of different neurotransmitters, and the first generation of MAOIs would increase the level of a large fraction since the I is for inhibiting one or two MAO enzymes that break them down.
“Xanax” would be shorthand for the benzodiazepines of which there are many more; their effect on GABA is basically the same so which are chosen depends on things like speed of onset and how (fast) they’re eliminated from the body. You could also include the Z drugs in this class.
There’s also buspirone for anxiety, and, geeze, just spend some quality time with Wikipedia for each disorder and see what all is prescribed for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiolytic Where there’s quite a few more than buspirone in the Miscellaneous category, a number like it hitting things other than GABA. Or see the Anxiolytics infobox at the bottom of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buspirone which adds the Gabapentinoids like gabapentin which despite its name does not hit GABA but “a subset of calcium channels.” For a general overview of many classes for many disorders see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATC_code_N05.
AHDH drugs I don’t know much about, as far as I know they’re all stimulants. Their over prescription is certainly controversial, but the disorder is very real, I had a friend who was diagnosed when he was in college and they made a big difference for him, and I’m told for his father as well.
Then we get into the drugs for the severely mentally ill, those with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The later are treated with the appropriately named anti-psychotics which have two generations, the latter is called “atypical.” For bipolar that latter class works, as well as classic lithium, and there’s a bunch of anti-seizure drugs that also work for them. As far as I know all of these drugs tend to have problems, so part of which is picked will be based on what the patient tolerates.
Absolutely none of these are “mild narcotics,” but if that was shorthand for sedatives, the GABA hitting ones including self-medication with alcohol certainly qualify, and I’ve heard the first generation anti-psychotics being called “major tranquilizers.”
They’re what got me interested in this whole field when I learned from mother who was a RN in the 1950s how she personally witnessed their being miracle drugs between when she did three months of her residency in a psych ward and then later as a full fledged nurse being amazed at how one of the hopeless cases was working in the same hospital in a janitorial or other lower level staff role. Being able to treat these severe disorders which had plagued us for millennia of recorded history was a big thing.
Szasz and Peter Breggin should get a lot more attention than they do.
I’m sorry to say that not all schools have cameras, especially those as poor as in Uvalde.
But I doubt that it matters in this case. Any cameras would probably all have mysteriously stopped working during the crime.
Disagree. I haven’t noticed they have issues above and beyond the norm. They seem like common-and-garden professional class types to me. The trouble with psychiatry and clinical psychology is that ‘treatment’ has one secure result: the practitioner gets paid. The question at hand is do they do anything which would improve on the work of time, work supervisors, and general adversity.
If you’re talking about people with schizophreniform problems, it’s a reasonable wager they do. You have to recall, though, what Fuller Torrey has to say about effective supervision of schizophrenics: a general practitioner with an interest in the subject and who has educated himself about it can be an improvement over a psychiatrist in many cases. You also have to recall that Torrey has been a persistent critic of American psychiatry on the supervision of schizophrenics, contending they abandoned them because they found them troublesome and boring. (Torrey is an advocate of much more extensive use of long-term custodial care for schizophrenics).
Then you get to the purveyors of the talking cure. Some of them are honest and doing their best with difficult people. A great many of them are ticket-punchers who are going through the motions when they’re not peddling some dubious set of contentions about family relations or the psyche or human behavior. And the child and adolescent practitioners typically have a conflict of interest, inasmuch as their revenue is dependent on the good will of the person or persons commonly responsible (by omission or commission) for the problem they’re supposed to address. The marriage counselors have a different conflict of interest in that their revenue is dependent on keeping the wife happy. (The assumption of the trade-book discourse peddled by Scott Peck and Rollo May 40 years ago was that the failures of psychotherapy were attributable to the patient; I think it’s much more difficult to sell that thesis than it used to be).
On the subject of human sexuality, it’s immediately evident that the mental health trade is a contributor to and regulated by the kultursmog.
uvalde knew everything about the shooter before the shooting because they had artificial intelligence monitoring social media expecially to detect threats- so they knew he was coming, they left the door open for him, and they ordered the police to stand down:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-06-01-uvalde-school-district-monitored-social-media-of-students.html
here it is detailed that the guy had no job, no credit, no photo ID to buy a weapon, and his equipment cost almost $9000
https://gab.com/BeachMilk/posts/108401716582809267
no how on earth is it possible to pass a federal firearms check with no ID?!?!?! answer, it is not possible unless the FBI gives the OK!
I have no opinion on the Uvalde door, but as a smoker (of small cigars) I know all the tricks.
The first thing I do when I am in one of those “no smoking” zones is find a security guard. I walk up and smile and say the magic words “Where do you smoke?”
They always escort me to a place well hidden from prying Karen eyes.
Sometimes they join me.
They make sure that I am not disturbed by non-smokers as well.
I don’t think lack of money has anything to do with the lack of school cameras. Teachers unions do. ASFAIK ALL school buses are required to have cameras but not school classrooms. Why is that? My guess is teachers unions don’t want parents to see what passes for education in their kids classrooms and Administrators don’t either.
You’re making the unwarranted by history assumption anyone was paying attention to what the AI was reporting. See for example the Target hack through a chiller/freezer vendor’s back door of sorts; that was reported through their security monitoring program but no human ever took note of it or acted on it. This is very common if not nearly universal for a program produces too many false positives.
https://vdare.com/radio-derb/zone-of-chaos-more-guns-please-for-teachers-a-mind-diseased-and-princeton-fires-classicist-etc
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/2022-05-27.html
you are making the unwarranted assumption that no one paid attention! so what’s good for the goose, is good for the gander. this guy had been reported to school authorities many times. he had even stopped going to school. he had even been arrested 3 years earlier plotting to shoot up his high school on the anniversary of columbine. nor can you explain how he bought firearms and passed a firearm check with no hob, no money, and without a driver’s livense ID. you just got your ass kicked.
“Sure, we have a handful of drugs like Lithium that help with manic depression; although, as Dr Moncrieff says, Lithium is also toxic, and the long-term benefits are questionable”
Derb, I’m pretty sure you meant Librium (Chlordiazepoxide, trade name Librium among others, is a sedative and hypnotic medication of the benzodiazepine class; it is used to treat anxiety, insomnia and symptoms of withdrawal from alcohol and other drugs) and not Lithium (It is a soft, silvery-white alkali metal).
I stand corrected;
“Certain lithium compounds, also known as lithium salts, are used as psychiatric medication, primarily for bipolar disorder and for major depressive disorder that does not improve following the use of antidepressants. In these disorders, it sometimes reduces the risk of suicide”
“I’m skeptical of talk about causes and solutions. I don’t believe this is a zone of cause and effect, of problem and solution: I think this is a zone of chaos; a zone where stuff happens, without any rhyme or reason we can comprehend at the present state of our knowledge.”
Surely this is just frustration on the authors part? We live in a cause and effect universe; there is a cause.
It is the Irish who have been subverted by WASP culture, not vice versa.
news flashes from today: uvalde school district has gone into lockdown 48 times in the last year- so clearly they are paying close attention to threats. and that disproves your dumbass ASSumptions- doesn’t it? thought so. turns out the school police chief, one pedro arredondo, has made political contributions to FRANCES beto o’rourke, the gun grabber who crashed the governor’s speech condemning the uvalde shooting to push his anti 2nd amendment agenda. and all these moves were orchestrated in advance, pedro’s contribution to beto, pedro ‘stand down’ order, pedro getting sworn in to the city council days after the shooting. when in reality, he should be getting RECALLED, instead, he is getting promoted! that’s how it worls in obama world- you betray your constituents, you get promoted. pedro has already been caught several times making FALSE claims about the details of the shooting. so that makes him a proven liar.
You replied to the wrong comment.
He’s talking about white nations. America isn’t white, and not much left of a nation, either.
You misspelled “Harry Truman”.
Yeah, right…
“uvalde knew everything about the shooter before the shooting because they had artificial intelligence monitoring social media expecially to detect threats- so they knew he was coming, they left the door open for him, and they ordered the police to stand down:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-06-01-uvalde-school-district-monitored-social-media-of-students.html
here it is detailed that the guy had no job, no credit, no photo ID to buy a weapon, and his equipment cost almost $9000
https://gab.com/BeachMilk/posts/108401716582809267
no how on earth is it possible to pass a federal firearms check with no ID?!?!?! answer, it is not possible unless the FBI gives the OK!”
Jesus fucking Christ. You believe this nuttery but you DON’T believe that a teacher propped a door open to go out and burn one on break, because there is a law against it? I’m not convinced you’ve entirely thought this through.
Poor bipolar Freddie deBoer writing about his medications and their side effects back in March 2021:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-weight?s=r
That’s a possibility. Nor do individual teachers want to be recorded all day at work. Nor do I, for that matter. Isn’t it a shame that we can’t guarantee a curriculum free of leftist nonsense without resorting to Big Brother tactics?
One MAJOR criticism – it DID NOT take police 14 minutes to respond. Officers, including school police, were in the building and engaging with Ramos in 3-4 minutes after he entered. He shot through the closed and locked steel door and wounded two of them. They found themselves in a situation because they couldn’t get at him. There were seven officers in the building within a few minutes, with part of them engaging with Ramos while the others were evacuating students and teachers from other classrooms.
Here is an old discussion of false flags–claiming “shoes” are the “marker” of the conspirators:
https://www.unz.com/audio/gunsbutter_the-global-tour-of-terror-a-theory-of-false-flag-operations-389/
What does that have to do with Uvalde:
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/07/1103577387/matthew-mcconaughey-green-converse-shoes-sneakers-uvalde-maite-rodriguez
and the other shootings like Sandy Hook:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/13/politics/shoe-memorial-congress-gun-violence/index.html
They are rubbing our noses in it.